1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the retrieval of computer resources.
2. State of the Art
In the space of just a few years, the Internet has gone from being a buzzword to being an indispensable part of the way people work. Information is located on the Internet using Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs. The most familiar type of URL is the Web page address, e.g., www.company.com. Many other types of URLs may also be used, for example, network locations, FTP locations, news locations, e-mail addresses, file locations, network zones, etc. As the Internet has progressed from being a curiosity to being a heavily-used tool, a need has arisen for organizing URLs in such a way as to facilitate repeated access of an Internet resource. The most familiar way of organizing URLs is to simply add URLs to a “favorites list,” organized alphabetically. When an Internet resource is accessed and displayed under control of a Web browser, the user may select a command to add the URL of the resource to a menu-style favorites list. The URL itself may be displayed within the list, or a natural-language description of the resource may be displayed. To access the same resource again at a later time, the user may simply select the appropriate entry within the list.
Although a favorites list is very useful, it is a simple, fixed organizational scheme that can only become increasingly cumbersome with increased use. An alternative approach to organizing URLs is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,737,560, incorporated herein by reference. This patent describes a “Web Jumper” software tool that may be used to create “jumpsites.” A jumpsite is an iconographic representation of a URL. Doubling clicking on a jumpsite causes a Web browser to be activated to retrieve the resource specified by the URL. An options button allows a user to set a default Web browser and a default directory in which a jumpsite is stored. This solution, while providing a great improvement over conventional favorites lists, leaves considerable room for improvement. In particular, because URLs are machine-intelligible but not necessarily machine intelligible, user interaction with URLs should not only avoid typing of URLs but should also be “forgiving” when a URL is incompletely specified. Furthermore, because the Internet is still rapidly evolving, flexibility should be preserved to use URLs in many different ways with potentially many different programs. What is needed, then, is a flexible user-driven method of creating and organizing URLs on a user machine.